Metaphor Quotes

He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every word tacked nine-inches deep into the beams of our minds.

I look at him and my body reacts in a way that it never has before, even in the throes of passion. I look at him and I start aching so deep inside it takes all I can to think, to breathe, to speak. He’s like the brightest flame and it takes everything in me to resist its call.I know that if I give in, I’ll get burned so deeply, there might be nothing left once I come out the other side.But, god, I want to step into that flame.

...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

We cannot be too cautious, Hannelore. Just because someone knocks on the door doesn't mean you have to open it. Sometimes, sweet girl, there are wolves at the door. If we are not careful, they might eat us.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

It´s a metaphor: you see, you put the killing thing right between your teeth,you just don't give it the power to do it's killing.

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I am not plain, or average or - God forbid - vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge and a cherry on top.

My mom’s smile is genuine,A lilac beamingIn the presence of her Sun.Indentions in the sand proveTime’s linear progression,Her hair yet unblighted,Carrying midnight’s consistency.Clear tracks fading as theMovement slips furtherIn the past.CheekbonesHigh, soft,In summer’s hue,Hopeful.Each step’s unknown impact,A future looking back.My father’s strength:One whoseLife is in his arms.Squinting past the camera,He rests upon a rockLike caramel corn half eaten,Just to the leftOf man-made concrete conventionDaylight’s eraserRemoving color to his right.Dustin sitsIn my father’s lap,Open mouth of a droolingBig mouth bass;Muscle toneOf a well exercisedJelly fish,He looks at meHalf aware;His wheelchairPerched at the edgeOf parking lot gravel graftedLike a scar on nature’s beach,Opening to the ironic splendorOf a bitter tasting lake.I took the picture.Age 11.Capturing the pinnacle arcOf a sonTo my lilacWhoOutlived him and weeps,Still.Their sky has staple holes –Maybe that’s how theLightLeaked out.

Youth is like being carried through life by a strong current," Admiral Winter said. "All you feel is the speed of the river, the thrill of rapids, never comprehending your utter lack of control, your constant peril.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Anne tried to bite her tongue, but she was finding her mouth bloody too often.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.

Stretched and skewedTap of the 8-ball and the cueScratches fall throughThey are the scars of you

For it is better to drink a wholesome draught of truth from the humble vessel, than poison mixed with honey from a golden goblet.

Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it's never taking your car out of the garage. It's safe in there, but you'll never go anywhere.

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

Maybe we're standing like coins on the edge?"Allie considered this. "Meaning?""Meaning, we might be able to shake things up a little, and find a way to come up heads.""Or tails," suggested

Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust. And if a guy is paying attention to you, he wants to have sex with you.

The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.

Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other.

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.

A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done, cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition.

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.

Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.

Grandmother was like an opal. You could never be sure which colors were really there and which were just tricks of the light.

I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue-sweet yet insubstantial.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

Is that true," I asked, "that song?""It is a metaphor," said Mrs. Davis, "it has metaphorical truth.""And the end of the mechanical age," I said, "is that a metaphor?""The end of the mechanical age," said Mrs. Davis, "is in my judgment an actuality straining to become a metaphor. One must wish it luck, I suppose. One must cheer it on. Intellectual rigor demands that we give these damned metaphors every chance, even if they are inimical to personal well-being and comfort. We have a duty to understand everything, whether we like it or not–a duty I would scant if I could." At that moment the water jumped into the boat and sank us.

It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby...He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving.

Mind you,” said Ponder, “the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death—” “Chicken soup and croutons,” said Ridcully. "Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination".

The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.

Smoke and mirrors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon.

You're a marshmallow. Soft and sweet and when you get heated up you go all gooey and delicious."-

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe that we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.

Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil.

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

love was never meant to bejust a metaphorbetween the pages of poetry.

If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.

We were as big as the ocean, but as fragile as an ego.

The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.

Every human is a school subject. This is rather a metaphorical way of saying it, to put it straight, those you love are few, and the ones you detest are many.

And metaphors like cats behind your smile,Each one wound up to purr,each one a pride,Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

The water never stops, never gives up, and denies no faults in the path it takes,” he explained, my eyes still focused down the ravine, “It moves silently, only a mere trickle to entertain itself as it causes a massive gash in the world. This, Zack, is true power.